Where the Bodies Were Buried (41 page)

One day before the committee was scheduled to begin hearing testimony, President Bush invoked executive privilege, the first time he had done so in his presidency, and ordered the attorney general to not turn over documents. The lengths the FBI was willing to go to keep the Deegan case buried were extreme. Eventually, after five months of legal wrangling, a compromise was reached. The executive privilege order was lifted and some documents were released, but they were heavily redacted.

Even for those who were aware of malfeasance in the criminal justice
system in New England, the findings of the committee were devastating. Nearly forty years after Teddy Deegan was gunned down in an alleyway in Chelsea, the public learned for the first time the full magnitude of the conspiracy. They learned there was an illegal wiretap conversation in which Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi asked for permission to murder Deegan from Raymond Patriarca. The committee learned that the FBI had been told after the murder that they were pursuing a wrongful prosecution, and they buried this information. A detailed file-by-file, memo-by-memo re-creation of the Deegan case showed either knowing or willfully ignorant collaboration at many levels of the criminal justice system.

One person who was not aware of the conspiracy was Jack Zalkind, lead prosecutor at the Deegan trial, who was deliberately left in the dark. After being shown documents relevant to his case, Zalkind told the committee, “I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn't be sitting here. . . . I certainly never would have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way. . . . That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it's terrible, and the trial shouldn't have gone forward.”

Over the course of the next fifteen months, in periodic public hearings in front of the committee. many key players were called to testify, including:

H. Paul Rico
—Seared by his years in the Florida sun, surly and unrepentant, Rico came before the committee in May 2001. Having retired as a legendary and highly decorated agent, Rico testified as if he had nothing to fear. In the hallway outside the committee hearing room, he stuck his finger in the chest of committee counsel James Wilson and said, “What are you going to do to me, Mr. Wilson? I'm seventy-six years old. What the fuck are you going to do?”

In his testimony, Rico admitted that a memo, written by him, had first been sent to his supervisor in the organized crime squad noting that a hit on Deegan had been discussed and authorized. That memo was initialized and forwarded to the SAC of the Boston division, then sent to a regional supervisor in Washington, D.C. Eventually that memo landed on the desk of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who micromanaged every aspect of the informant program and was kept abreast of the Deegan case. The FBI, all the way to
the top man, allowed the murder of Deegan to take place. They knew their star witness, Barboza, was involved. They knowingly allowed Barboza to take the stand and give a version of the killing that was markedly different from what they were hearing from other sources.

Many people within the criminal justice system had reason to believe the Deegan convictions were tainted, and they did nothing. Two of the four men wrongfully convicted were sentenced to the death penalty and incarcerated on death row. Two of them died in prison before the truth became known.

A congressman asked Rico, “Does it bother you that an innocent man spent thirty years in jail?”

Said the witness, “It would probably be a nice movie or something.”

“Do you have any remorse?”

“Remorse for what?”

“So you don't really care much and you don't have any remorse. Is that true?”

“What do you want, tears?” answered the agent.

Paul Rico would accept no blame and faced no consequences for the framing of innocent men. In October 2003 he was indicted for his role in another crime, the murder of Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Lai. He was arrested at his condominium in Miami Shores by Sergeant Mike Huff of the Tulsa Police Department, lead investigator in the Wheeler homicide case.

Three months later, at the age of seventy-eight, Rico died in a Tulsa hospital, where he had been moved from prison while awaiting trial.
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Dennis Condon
—As Rico's partner, Condon was another key player in the cultivation of Barboza and the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions.
Condon did not appear before the committee, but he was deposed under oath by committee investigators, and his deposition was an integral aspect of the committee's final report.

Condon was forced to admit that Barboza had made it clear to him and Paul Rico that he would never testify against his friend Jimmy the Bear Flemmi, who had been an accomplice in the Deegan murder. Barboza told the agents, in so many words, If you put me on the stand I will lie to protect my friend. This fact was memorialized in FBI 209 field reports and airtels that went from field agents to supervisors all the way to Hoover.

By this time, Barboza had been a witness at the Patriarca trial and helped deliver the biggest mafia prosecution in the history of the bureau. Part of protecting the sanctity of the Patriarca conviction involved preserving the credibility of Barboza. That's why the FBI was willing to put him on the stand and have him commit perjury.

When Dennis Condon was first approached in 1997 and asked about James Bulger, he said he had no recollection of ever having met the man. It didn't take long to jog his memory; there were voluminous FBI file reports of his having opened Bulger as an informant in 1971. At the Wolf hearings in 1998, Condon's friend and fellow agent John Morris and Steve Flemmi both testified about Condon attending dinner gatherings at Morris's home in Lexington, in the company of Bulger and Flemmi.

The FBI and the criminal justice system in New England had for so long been successful at keeping their dirty secrets buried, that for someone like Condon, who was a devout Catholic with a sterling public reputation, the revelations were a nightmare come true. Though he was never indicted for his actions or legally held accountable in any way, when Condon died of natural causes in 2009, he did so knowing that his name will forever be associated with the FBI's legacy of corruption in Boston, from the Deegan murder case to the Bulger scandal.

Edward “Ted” Harrington
—In the late 1960s, as an assistant U.S. attorney, Harrington seemed willing to do almost anything to protect Joe Barboza. Under questioning by the Burton committee, Harrington admitted that, previous to the Deegan murder trial, he reviewed a confidential FBI memo that revealed Barboza and Jimmy the Bear Flemmi were behind the Deegan murder and had, they believed, been given permission to kill
Deegan by Patriarca. That memo included references to the gypsy wire planted at Patriarca's office in Providence. Harrington was required by law to have released that evidence to lawyers representing the codefendants at the Deegan murder trial. He did not, which was possibly a crime or at least an act of criminal negligence. Confronted with these facts, Harrington told the committee that he simply forgot about the memo.

“For you to say you didn't remember it stretches my imagination,” said Burton.

Harrington conceded nothing. When asked if he regretted having flown to California with agents Rico and Condon to testify as a character witness at Barboza's murder trial, Harrington said no. To him, defending Barboza was a consequence of the need to preserve the government's informant program, which had became the single most important tool in law enforcement's war against the mafia.

For his actions, Harrington received kudos and rose in his career from an assistant U.S. attorney to chief of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force to U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and, finally, the crown jewel, when in 1987 he was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Harrington presided over criminal cases in Boston for the next twenty-five years.

In 2008, during the trial of John Connolly on murder charges in Miami, Harrington put his reputation on the line and took the stand on behalf of the defense. Just as he had with Barboza forty years earlier, he was there to defend the accused on the grounds that he had been a valuable compatriot in the government's war against organized crime.

Much had changed since 1969, when, at Barboza's murder trial in California, Harrington portrayed the war against the Mob as a battle between clearly defined good and evil. By the time of Connolly's trial, the story of how Bulger and Flemmi had been protected by multiple FBI agents, a top organized crime prosecutor, and higher-ups in the DOJ, and kept out on the street to commit murders and other crimes, had entered the public consciousness. Despite Judge Harrington's testimony on behalf the disgraced agent, Connolly was found guilty of murder in the second degree.

In September 2013, Harrington retired from the federal bench as a highly lauded and esteemed veteran of the criminal justice system.

Jeremiah O'Sullivan
—Members of the Burton committee were especially intrigued by the prospect of having former prosecutor O'Sullivan come before them as a witness.

Four years earlier, O'Sullivan had suffered a heart attack and missed having to testify at the Wolf hearings. At the time, defense lawyer Tony Cardinale noted that back in 1980, prosecutor O'Sullivan had fought vociferously when Mafioso Larry Zannino used a medical claim that he was too sick to come to court. O'Sullivan challenged the claim and had Zannino dragged into court, even though he was in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tank. Hearing that O'Sullivan was now utilizing a similar tactic, defense lawyers in Boston said he had “pulled a Zannino.”

Though O'Sullivan had emerged as a primary inheritor of the region's systemic legacy of corruption, he had successfully stonewalled the press. He had been called to testify at the Burton committee hearings under a federal subpoena and began his testimony by reading a statement that read, in part: “I state categorically and unequivocally that, although I was made aware of the status of Bulger and Flemmi as FBI informants in the late 1970s, I never authorized them to commit any crimes and have no knowledge of such authorization.”

Most of the questions for O'Sullivan revolved around his decision to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the 1979 race-fix prosecution, which led to the conviction of Howie Winter, Jimmy Sims, and nineteen other confederates of the Winter Hill Mob. O'Sullivan claimed that he had made the decision before he was approached by Connolly and Morris based on the fact that neither Bulger nor Flemmi was central to race-fix conspiracy. But then a lawyer for the committee read a January 1979 memo, written by O'Sullivan, naming Bulger and Flemmi as integral players in the scheme.

“Is this memo correct?” asked the committee lawyer.

“It must have been at the time I wrote it . . . so you got me,” said O'Sullivan. He wasn't too worried. The congressional committee hearings were not legally binding; no matter how mendacious he sounded, he would not be indicted for perjury.

O'Sullivan did his best to distance himself from Connolly and Morris, saying of the FBI, “If you go against them, they will try to get you. They will wage war on you. They will create major administrative problems for me as a prosecutor.”

Later, after acknowledging that Bulger and Flemmi were two of the most notorious murderers in the Boston underworld, he was asked by a congressman why, upon hearing that they were being used to make criminal cases in his jurisdiction, he didn't try to close them as informants.

Answered the former most powerful organized crime prosecutor in New England, “Because that would have precipitated World War III if I tried to get inside the FBI to deal with informants. That was the holy of holies, the inner sanctuarium. They wouldn't have allowed me to do anything about that.”

IT IS NOT
uncommon for people in law enforcement to joke about criminals turning on one another. Cops refer to the underworld as “a self-cleaning oven.” Popular wisdom dictates that there is no honor among thieves. If a criminal is used to rat on another criminal, so be it, and if that criminal is telling lies to take down other criminals, it is, perhaps, in the minds of some, not the worst thing in the world. The reality that innocent people might become collateral damage in this provisional approach to justice is more than many in law enforcement are willing to acknowledge.

What do you want from me, tears?

Paul Rico became a player in the criminal underworld, some might say a gangster with a badge. He was rewarded for the role he played by those who sent him into battle.

Jeremiah O'Sullivan claimed that he did not trust the FBI, but he knew better than to rock the boat. When asked, specifically, if he concerned himself with troubling facts about the Teddy Deegan murder trial or other rumored injustices that he might have inherited as U.S. attorney, O'Sullivan answered, “I did not, Congressman.”

“Why not?”

“It just wasn't on my turf. I didn't think that I could right the wrongs of the whole world.”

Policies of law enforcement are frequently driven by public relations. For an entire generation of cops, agents, and prosecutors, the war on the LCN was the biggest game in town. Daring new techniques were created, such as the Top Echelon Informant Program and the witness protection program.
Agents like Rico and Connolly who could rub shoulders with gangsters and cultivate informants became the new stars.

In this war that spanned nearly half a century, there were many victims.

At the Bulger trial, the most obvious manifestation of the price that had been paid was the daily gathering of family members of Bulger's many murder victims. These were people who had lost loved ones, though, in most cases, the people Bulger was alleged to have murdered were fellow criminals, or others who, by choice, had tragically entered into the orbit of Bulger and Flemmi.